20 years ago MySpace and Facebook ushered in an exciting era of social media. Today, there’s no escaping the troubling analogy of online life. Connectivity is both a convenience and a curse. A lot has changed since those early days. In June, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy called for warning labels on social platforms contributing to the youth mental health crisis, noting that “social media is a significant He is emerging as a person.” A new FX documentary series, Social Studies, from documentarian Lauren Greenfield offers a startling look at the disturbing effects of that crisis.
The thesis was simple. Greenfield set out to catalog the first generation, when social media was a ubiquitous, preordained reality. From August 2021 to summer 2022, she spent the school year working with groups of teens at several high schools in the Los Angeles area (the majority of the students attend Palisades Charter). They indulged in unrequited love, applied to colleges, attended prom, and pursued their passions.
“This was a rare documentary for me,” says Greenfield, a veteran filmmaker of cultural investigations such as The Queen of Versailles and Generation Wealth, about how the series came together. . “The children were co-investigators on this journey.” In addition to the 1,200 hours of primary photography that Greenfield and her team took, students were also asked to save screen recordings of their daily phone usage. and the footage amounted to an additional 2,000 hours. This spliced documentary highlights the complex and unforgiving experiences of teens dealing with body dysmorphia, bullying, social acceptance, suicidal thoughts, and more. “This is the most ground-breaking part of this project, because we’ve never really seen it before.”
The depth of the five-episode series benefits from Greenfield’s encyclopedic approach. The results are perhaps the most accurate and comprehensive depiction of Gen Z’s relationship with social media. With the final episode coming out this week (available to stream on Hulu), I spoke with Greenfield over Zoom about her sometimes brutal and seemingly endless experiences as an online teenager.
Jason Parham: In one episode, a student says, “I don’t think it’s safe to log into TikTok.” After spending the last three years immersed in this world, do you think social media is bad?
Lauren Greenfield: I don’t think it’s an either-or question. I really went into this as a social experiment. This is the first generation that couldn’t grow up without it. So while social media has been around for a while, it is the first generation of digital natives. I thought it would be the perfect time to think about how that affects my childhood. That’s the biggest cultural influence on this generation growing up, bigger than their parents, their peers, their school, especially from the pandemic when we started filming. You know, I didn’t come into the shoot with a perspective or an activist purpose, but what the teens told me and what they showed in their lives, that is. , I was certainly struck by how dire the situation was.
